“The subject of the footage is going to change, briefly, for context. We believe this is what attracted her to Singapore initially.”

  Impact Site. Field Manipulator “Lawrence Yong,” directly before Major FM Conflict Event. Time To Impact minus nine minutes, thirteen seconds.

  Fisheye security camera footage of a business meeting in an upper-story Singapore office. The city sprawls in the background, visible through a series of large windows bracketing Yong, who sits, talking into a desk phone, several aides and other employees scattered around the table with him.

  “This is-”

  “Lawrence Yong, CEO of Luckybank and a Demigod-Class Field Manipulator,” the Voice on the Phone said. “About to be ambushed by Imran Bhatt, near-Demigod-Class, ex-Pakistani Navy. Both die in the Impact. I said I’d been briefed.”

  Steiner cleared his throat again, fidgeted with his tie, and resumed the footage.

  Lawrence Yong visibly stiffens mid-sentence. He sits straight, head cocked as if listening for something. He startles, standing from the chair and whirling around, drawing confused looks from his underlings.

  The window behind him shatters as a city bus, hurled hundreds of feet up from the street below, crashes through the room. The camera cuts out.

  Conflict Event in progress. Time To Impact minus eight minutes, twelve seconds.

  A lanky man stands in a quickly emptying city street, a crater in the asphalt at his feet, his head craned up to look at, presumably, the building he’d just launched a bus at. He’s dressed in what looks like a homemade suit of armor, bulky to the point of seeming immobility. Studded all over his torso, jutting out like blocky tumors and festooned with wires, are batteries.

  He shifts his weight from foot to foot, shades his eyes, trying to get a visual. He tenses, braces as Yong’s conference room table slams into him, blisteringly quickly, an improvised artillery shell.

  The dust clears and the tall man, Imran Bhatt, stands untouched, the table cleaved in two, each half seated in its own crater behind him. He crackles with energy, bolts of lightning dance across his form and lick the ground. He holds his arms out as if in welcome, and, a blur from above and out of frame, Yong impacts him harder than the table had. The two go flying through the wall of a restaurant behind them.

  A series of angles from different CCTV and Ring cameras tracks the progress of the two men as they hurl each other across the city. Customers flee the restaurant as the two blur around it, a whirlwind rendered silent by the video-only footage. Bhatt’s blows are slow and dancelike, easily evaded by Yong, who wields a parking meter like a club. His hits connect, but don’t seem to so much as stagger the taller man, who only glows brighter and crackles with more lightning as each one connects.

  Bhatt feints and, as Yong dips behind him and aims a blow at the back of his knees, suddenly whips his arms apart, palms out. A wave of energy rips through him, blowing Yong and every object not bolted to the ground flying away, crackling with electricity.

  From a street camera outside: the building that the restaurant had been at the first floor of shudders and begins to fall, its walls buckling outward. Yong tumbles out into the street, seizing, singed. He pants, struggles to stand, his arms and legs shuddering and shaking. He collapses, appearing dead.

  Bhatt approaches from the dust and ruin in his wake, careful but confident. Seeing Yong’s prone form, he wrenches a stop sign from the sidewalk, hefts it like a makeshift spear, and darts over to finish his quarry.

  Yong tumbles over, mouth open in a soundless roar, and whips the manhole cover he’d been laying atop like a discus, the few stray bolts of electricity dancing across his skin dissipating in an instant as he does so, disappearing into his skin a moment before the throw.

  The velocity of the manhole cover creates a sonic boom that shatters car windows. It nearly bisects Bhatt, who only half dodges in time, cleaves a neat gouge through his armor and stomach, an inch-thick line thick enough for sunlight to shine through.

  Bhatt glows with newfound energy and stumbles backward, a grimace painted on his face. He barks something that could have been a taunt, or a laugh, or a curse. He raises his stop sign like a staff, slams it on the asphalt.

  The street shudders and erupts, a bamboo forest of lightning sprouting from beneath it and arcing into the sky. Trash cans and benches and sedans and Yong are tossed dozens of feet into the air, all wrapped in a shimmering, jagged swath of electricity.

  In a blink, Bhatt is above Yong, cutting his trajectory short with a brutal downward swat of his stop sign. Yong careens back to the ground and shatters, his body disintegrating and burning at once. The businessman is reduced in an instant to a tumbling, charred circle of viscera.

  Bhatt plummets to the ground, stumbles on his landing, nearly falls. He stands over Yong’s remains, shoulders heaving, blood flooding from his gaping midsection. His breathing deepens, and he reaches one hand out toward something unseen, in the air just before him.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  He reacts suddenly, arcing his body in a seizure, still maintaining his footing. The batteries on his suit detonate one at a time, eggs in a microwave, splattering wiring and sparks across the ruined pavement. His face is hard to make out in the footage, and without audio it is difficult to discern if he is screaming or laughing.

  The flow of blood from his stomach begins to staunch. His wound begins to knit itself together. Bhatt looks down at his hands, flexes them, breathes deeply. He moves to remove his armor.

  Then he pauses, stiffening much in the same way Yong had a minute ago, before he’d been struck with that airborne bus. He turns his head, slowly, unsure, upward, toward the sky. He cranes backward to look at something in the distance, directly above him.

  His face wilts, going from triumph, to bewilderment, to terror.

  Cell Phone footage of Person of Interest, shortly after second re-entry. Time To Impact minus two minutes, fifty seconds.

  Shaky handheld iPhone video shows, through the smudged acrylic of a passenger plane’s window, a shimmering green triangle, hovering above the Singaporean skyline. The plane, well into its descent to the runway, is only briefly low enough to offer an angle clear enough to see the woman’s head, her hands, her face.

  She’s staring down at a growing plume of smoke at her feet. She’s smiling. She holds her arms out to her sides, as if going for an embrace. She waves toward herself, inviting. Challenging.

  Bhatt engages POI in combat. Time To Impact minus one minute, thirty-eight seconds.

  Bhatt scrambles down the street, blisteringly quick, pausing every second or so to grab a piece of debris and hurl it at something well above him. He flings streetlights and mopeds up like supersonic javelins, fast enough that the camera doesn’t capture their movement, making them appear to disappear from his hands over the course of a frame.

  If his targets find their mark, they are ineffective. He sees something in the sky that frightens him and he bolts, ducking beneath the protruding glass facade of one of the city’s massive skyscrapers.

  A green bolt from the sky cleaves through the overhang, and the skyscraper with it, sending Bhatt caroming down the street and off frame, just ahead of a shockwave and a cloud of black smoke.

  Another angle from a camera several streets down shows Bhatt ricochet off a parked bus, nearly breaking the vehicle in two, and into a brick wall. He slides down, his body impossibly intact, but his face and arms stippled with burns. His skin smokes as he climbs to his feet and rubs himself, as if trying to clear the burns away like stains. It seems to gradually work.

  A figure emerges from the growing cloud of dust and paper and fleeing pedestrians. Her coat, rendered dimmer by the low-res CCTV, still manages to dazzle, to cast dancing reflections on the street around her. She’s small, maybe five feet tall, but she seems to loom over the cringing, frantic man down the road.

  Her cloak is pulled up over her head now, a hood of some sort, a golden tip at its apex plunging in a sharp arc over her face, like an eagle’s beak, hiding her eyes from view. She holds her hand out to the man, miming, beckoning.

  Bhatt glances around, desperate for an angle of egress. He darts, trying to pounce off a building above her and away, but she turns and points downward, and he drops from the air, his momentum suddenly and violently arrested as if unseen chains had yanked him back to earth.

  The woman paces over to him casually, stops a few feet away, and cocks her head. She gestures for him to stand, to dust himself off. He does so, trembling.

  She holds her arms out in that embrace again, waves toward herself, inviting. He stares, uncomprehending. She huffs, mimes a fighting stance, then points to herself again.

  The man shakes his head, begins to back away. In a flash, she’s at his side, one leg propped against his torso for leverage, and in another instant, she’s pulled his arm off at the shoulder and tossed it aside. The man’s mouth gapes in a silent scream and she walks back to where she stood before, arms crossed.

  She waits patiently as his arm regrows, going from a gaping wound to a bulging mass to a fetal stump to a pink, fresh limb. She gestures at herself again.

  The man’s chest rises and falls for a moment. He refastens a strap on his armor with shaking hands, then lowers to a crouch.

  When he lunges at the woman, the force of the shockwave his movement generates destroys the camera instantly.

  “We lose track of them here for a bit. Given that, shortly before impact, one of the Supertrees on the city’s edge was cut cleanly in half, and that most of the grove surrounding it was essentially glassed, we can assume their fighting took them briefly near the bay. This last shot is, chronologically, the last thing we’ve been able to capture of the Person of Interest.”

  Bhatt is killed. Time To Impact minus forty-three seconds.

  The tall man stands in tatters, scrap remnants of his armor dangling from his burned frame as he braces against a ruined wall. The background is a haze of smoke and dust and distant flames, rendering the geography of the city unrecognizable.

  He crouches, both arms reduced to smoking stumps that shudder and pulse as they regenerate. His head darts, desperately scanning his surroundings. He flinches a split-second before the woman streaks from somewhere above and craters him into the street.

  He kicks out from beneath her, rebounds off of the remains of a palm tree, and fires a quick succession of attacks: a blast wave, a jet of flame, a pulse of electricity, a kick. The woman barely moves as she avoids and absorbs them in quick succession. She effortlessly snags his leg as his kick goes wide. She dips beneath another desperate haymaker, one that cleaves a car behind her in half, and rips the man’s leg off at the knee with a bored sort of nonchalance.

  Bhatt is beyond screaming. His face is blank, his movements robotic. He doesn’t seem to feel it when she tosses him back to the wall and begins hammering him with blows of her own. He manages to pull himself fetal under the onslaught of thrown debris and beams of heat pummeling him.

  Eventually the woman steps back, hands on her hips. Bhatt is a livid ball of pulsing scar tissue. He shudders with every breath as his burned body regrows, reforms. The woman tilts her head, curious, and hits him with another barrage.

  He emerges again, still barely recognizable as human, but alive, regrowing. The woman appears to bark a laugh. She points a finger at the man, and he’s hurtled into the air by some unseen force, then back into the ground. Brutally, over and over, slammed again and again, hard enough to dig a trench a meter deep into the concrete.

  He doesn’t die. The woman applauds. She steps up to him, bends down, whispers something in his ear, and appears to rub the lump of livid flesh that may have once been his back, placating.

  Then she motions for him to look up.

  Bhatt raises his ruined head to the sky, and his face, barely recognizable now, contorts in fear and then awe.

  The woman raises one finger to the heavens, and the sky is cast in a brief, apocalyptic red as a mountain drops from space and crashes into Singapore.